The New Year's bountiful blessing:
Three hundred sixty-five
bright mornings and starlit evenings;
fifty-two promising weeks;
twelve transformative months
full of beautiful possibilities;
and four splendid seasons.
A simply abundant year
to be savored.

Sarah Palin slammed the 'lamestream media' for an MSNBC segment on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show mocking Mitt Romney’s adopted black grandson. The host apologized Tuesday for causing offense. This marks the second time the cable network has been criticized for a personal attack against a Republican personality....

It goes without saying, of course, that Melissa Harris-Perry’s apology was insincere: She hates and despises Mitt Romney, she hates and despises the entire Romney family, and she hates and despises everyone who voted for Romney. Whatever offensive thing she said about Romney’s grandchild was simply an expression of her partisan hatred and — because partisan hatred is the entire raison d’être of MSNBC — there’s no way Melissa Harris-Perry is going to apologize for that, is there?

...since he was showing solidarity with the rest of America, did the president actually get on his computer like the rest of America and try to navigate the disastrous Obamacare Web site he created? Nope. While most people had to plug their personal information into a Web site that ABC News reports still has “serious security vulnerabilities,” the White House decided that for “security reasons” sharing the president’s personal information on government Web sites was unwise. So, an administration official said, “Like some Americans, the complicated nature of the president’s case required an in-person sign-up.”

...If the White House was so confident that “the product is good” and Americans are “willing to be patient,” then they would have been eager for a photo op of the president signing up with other happy customers. But there was no photo op.

Then, to add insult to injury, Obama chose the cheapest of the four plans available — the bronze plan costing $400 a month. Not for his whole family, mind you. They don’t need Obamacare. He chose a low-cost plan just for himself. Which makes sense. He’s not going to actually use it, so why pay sky-high premiums like the millions of people he drove out of their individual market health plans?

In 2014, let’s resolve to preserve some semblance of freedom in our culture and respond to the next blitzkriegs by the progressive fascists with an unequivocal “Go to hell.”

Demanding that Americans hide their religious beliefs. Banning dissenting views on the climate change scam. Slandering people with charges of the kind of racism pioneered and perfected by the Democrat party.

...This campaign is not being pushed by “gays” any more than other campaigns are pushed by “minorities” or “women” or “climate scientists” or whoever else is the day’s designated oppressee. They are pushed by leftists to achieve progressive ends. Leftists care nothing about gay people, or minorities, or women, or global warming. They care about their own power.

Remember, everything progressives tell you about protecting “free speech” and “diversity” is a lie. They don’t want free speech or diversity. They want a plodding, creepy conformity of thought – their thought. Free speech and diversity were useful to them before they gained cultural power; now that they have it, these quaint ideas are liabilities that must be stamped out before someone normal exercises them.

For too long, we have sat back and let these jerks try to dictate what we think, what we feel and what we say. But that’s over. We’re done. Just ask Cracker Barrel.

...Remember, we don’t need to silence our opposition – empirical evidence demonstrates the meritlessness of leftist ideology. Liberals need to silence us because we’re right and they’re wrong.

They want a cultural war, and I say let them have it. We’re fighting for a vibrant, free culture with a multitude of religious expressions, with a plethora of ideas and a refusal to hide truth so as to not offend some vocal component of the leftist coalition. They demand a mindless, fearful conformity with everyone paying homage to the same pagan liberal idols.

Bill de Blasio, like any good Communist, isn’t just pushing the horse ban at random. His elevation was made possible by NYCLASS; a bunch of rich people posing as animal rights activists who don’t think that ordinary tourists should be able to ride horses in their backyard.

The man behind the Anti-Horse Jihad is Steve Nislick, a real-estate tycoon with an eye on their stables, and a hand in Bill de Blasio’s greasy pocket.

In the slimy world of New York politics, Nislick found useful idiot environmentalists to pursue his land agenda, and when Speaker Quinn proved to have more ethics than to go along with his horse ban, he turned to a slimier fellow; Bill de Blasio.

Following through on a campaign promise, New York City Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has pronounced the traditional horse drawn carriage industry in NYC's Central Park "over," claiming he will act quickly to end a practice he views as inhumane.

Unfortunately, as pointed out in the New York Post back in October, the move may result in the animals' slaughter.

There are more than 200 horses used in the city's carriage industry and their fate remains unknown as mayoral election approaches. It's possible the animals could be destroyed due to the expensive maintenance.

...These were among a string of investigations by the service, responsible for protecting dignitaries and investigating crimes within the department, that were allegedly derailed by senior officials, including one instance of interference by Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills.

Since the revelations in June, the department again mostly swept the cases under the rug.

...“We feel like we’re in a movie. It’s nuts. It makes us wonder ....maybe we’ve got something we don’t even realize or maybe they’re worried about something.”

"Tea Party forces will still win in the end," Theda Skocpol writes, unless moderate Republicans can defeat them. Skocpol concedes that the Tea Party "will triumph just by hanging on long enough" as Americans are getting fed up by "our blatantly manipulated democracy and our permanently hobbled government."

...Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson published a book in 2011 that "showed how bottom-up and top-down forces intersect to give the Tea Party both leverage over the Republican Party and the clout to push national politics sharply to the right."

"At the grassroots, volunteer activists formed hundreds of local Tea Parties, meeting regularly to plot public protests against the Obama Administration and place steady pressure on GOP organizations and candidates at all levels," they found. "At least half of all GOP voters sympathize with this Tea Party upsurge."

Skocpol also sends a warning to Democrats who think that the Tea Party will fade because of a few bad polls. "Once the October 2013 shutdown ended in supposed total victory for President Obama and his party, many Democrats adopted a cocky swagger and started talking about ousting the House GOP in 2014," Skocpol writes. However, she warns that "a clear-eyed look shows that Tea Party remains powerful and has achieved victories that continue to stymie" Democrats and their statist agenda.

Australian climate change professor Chris Turney, passengers and media hoping to get pictures penguins windsurfing where ice should be set out on an expedition to demonstrate the effects of global warming on Antarctica. The ship and all on board have now been trapped in ice for almost a week and counting...

So, what’s the carbon output of all these rescue ship and helicopters? I’m guessing they’re not solar powered.

...The Antarctic ice was unaware that the science was settled… and settled in place instead trapping Tuney and his media Warmist allies in its Climate Change denier grip.

The metaphor just couldn’t be more fitting: desperate true believers of global warming/accelerating polar ice melt now find themselves trapped by thousands of square kilometers of summertime sea ice that wasn’t supposed to be there.

No picture could better symbolize and communicate the intellectual bankruptcy and disillusionment of a faithful group who refuse to believe they have been led astray. This has to be deeply embarrassing, if not outright humiliating.

...This is what happens when a bunch of Warmists decamp from their local coffee shop to try and prove the climate wrong while tweeting and tumblring and emailing their way around the coldest place on earth.

As we reported previously on WUWT here and here, the saga of the “climate scientists/tourists trapped in ice” continues to fascinate many. Now a second ship has given up on rescue, after the Chinese ship “Snow Dragon” gave up two days ago. The Aurora Australis has abandoned rescue of the trapped Russian “research”vessel in Antarctica and a helicopter evacuation in now being ordered. This episode has taken on a heightened comedic fiasco-like quality.

Now, with such a fantastic failure in full world view, questions are going to start being asked. For example, with advanced tools at their disposal (that Mawson never had) such as near real-time satellite imaging of Antarctic sea ice, GPS navigation, on-board Internet, radar, and satellite communications, one wonders how these folks managed to get themselves stuck at all. Was it simple incompetence of ignoring the signs and data at their disposal combined with “full steam ahead” fever? Even the captain of the Aurora Australis had the good sense to turn back knowing he’d reached the limits of the ship on his rescue attempt. Or, was it some sort of publicity stunt to draw attention? If it was the latter, it has backfired mightily.

It probably seemed like an excellent idea: Load a bunch of tourists and journalists aboard a ship for an expedition to Antarctica in December (the height of summer at the South Pole) so they can see for themselves how global warming is melting the ice.

The expedition is being lead by Chris Turney, a climate scientist, who was hoping to reach the base camp of Douglas Mawson, one of the most famous Antarctic explorers, and repeat observations done by him in 1912 to see what impact climate change had made...

The scientists have been stuck aboard the stricken MV Akademik Schokalskiy since Christmas Day, with repeated sea rescue attempts being abandoned as icebreaking ships failed to reach them.
Now that effort has been ditched, with experts admitting the ice is just too thick. Instead the crew have built an icy helipad, with plans afoot to rescue the 74-strong team by helicopter.

This year was so bad that twerking wasn’t even the stupidest dance craze. That would be the “Harlem Shake,” which is not so much a dance as a mass nervous-system disorder, and which makes the “Gangnam Style” dance we mocked in 2012 look like “Swan Lake.”

We miss 2012.

But getting back to the zombies: It wasn’t just people who came back alarmingly in 2013. The Cold War with Russia came back. Al-Qaeda came back. Turmoil in the Middle East came back. The debt ceiling came back. The major league baseball drug scandal came back. Dennis Rodman came back and went on humanitarian missions to North Korea (or maybe we just hallucinated that). The Endlessly Looming Government Shutdown came back. People lining up to buy iPhones to replace iPhones that they bought only minutes earlier came back. And for approximately the 250th time, the Obama administration pivoted back to the economy, which has somehow been recovering for years now without actually getting any better. Unfortunately, before they could get the darned thing fixed, the administration had to pivot back to yet another zombie issue, health care, because it turned out that Obamacare, despite all the massive brainpower behind it, had some “glitches,” in the same sense that the universe has some “atoms.”

...But before we look ahead to next year, let’s take one last look back at the fiasco that was 2013, starting with … JANUARY

… which begins with a crisis in Washington, a city that — despite having no industries and a workforce consisting almost entirely of former student council presidents — manages to produce 93 percent of the nation’s crises. This particular crisis is a “fiscal cliff” caused by the fact that for years the government has been spending spectacular quantities of money that it does not have, which has resulted in a mess that nobody could possibly have foreseen unless that person had a higher level of financial awareness than a cucumber. At the last minute, congressional leaders and the White House reach an agreement under which the government will be able to continue spending spectacular quantities of money that it does not have, thus temporarily averting the very real looming danger that somebody might have to make a decision....

I suspect that the Times story tells us more about Hillary Clinton’s assessment of the threat Benghazi poses to her likely 2016 run for president than it does about what happened in Benghazi. But to the extent that the Times story is viewed as shedding a new, different light on the Benghazi, perhaps the House should hold new hearings on the attack.

Congressman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) ripped the New York Times for its recent report by David Kirkpatrick that al Qaeda was not a principal player in the 9/11/12 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

...KRISTEN WELKER: It was a year that started with great expectations but a few months later, a trio of controversies quickly threatened to detail President Obama’s second-term agenda. Revelations the IRS was targeting conservative groups. And that the Justice Department was seizing the phone records of journalists. Plus the ongoing fallout from the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi....

A new Gallup poll finds President Obama’s approval rating at 39 percent and his disapproval rating at 54 percent. But it’s not just that the public is increasingly displeased with the job Mr. Obama is doing; they are growing weary of the whole packaged deal. They are frustrated with the president, his style, his attitude, his approach to the job.

President Obama’s tanking approval rating in newly released polls shows Americans are tired of his whining, according to some experts, who also see a fighting chance for Republicans to rack up coast-to-coast victories in the 2014 midterm congressional races.

“We think of presidents as being morale leaders … and he goes out and complains,” according to Richard Benedetto, a retired White House correspondent and a journalism professor at American University.

Under one scenario, Obamacare overcomes its early troubles and turns into a smashing success, extending insurance to millions of Americans while causing little or no disruption to the vast majority of citizens. In this unlikely set of circumstances, the Republican policy response to Obamacare is likely to be quite modest.

Under a second scenario, Obamacare would end up ironing out some of its early wrinkles, but would still leave a lot of people complaining about poor access to doctors and hospitals, rising costs and too few choices. This could cause some Republicans to concede to keeping the law’s exchanges, but deregulating them to make it easier for individuals to purchase less comprehensive health insurance that’s cheaper or covers a wider network of providers. Or to propose alternatives to covering individuals with pre-existing conditions as well as scrapping the individual mandate.

Under a third scenario, individual insurance markets would collapse due to a failure to attract a critical mass of young and healthy consumers and Americans would be rebelling against reduced access as insurers pare provider networks. In such a case, Republicans are unlikely to abandon their efforts to repeal the law.

...the announcement, which came in the form of a blog post from CMS administrator Marilyn Tavenner, left many key questions unanswered.

To start, the figure doesn't reveal how many people actually paid for health plans as of Dec. 24. Though payment is what typically makes enrollment official, up to this point, CMS has counted people as being "enrolled" if they merely went through the process of picking a health care plan.

Additionally, CMS still hasn't provided a demographic breakdown of those who have signed up for insurance through the exchange, which is a key metric for measuring the success of Obamacare, because the exchanges need a critical mass of young and healthy individuals to offset the cost of covering older and sicker enrollees and those with pre-existing conditions.

Joe Perry, lead guitarist for the rock band Aerosmith, which is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and who with front-man Steven Tyler is in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, tweeted a defense of the Duck Dynasty controversy concerning anti-gay behavior saying, “More crackin’ down on Freedom of Speech in the US or what?”
In a follow-up tweet, Perry said, “Seems to me people have a right to express their opinions & religious beliefs. But that doesn’t mean we have to agree.”

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, and Sen.Ted Cruz (R-TX) emphatically defended Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson from the moment he was suspended by A&E for supposedly anti-gay remarks. The suspension provoked a relentless outpouring of support online, which pressured A&E to reinstate Robertson on Friday.

Palin, Jindal, and Cruz's support was in contrast to the silence of the Republican establishment, its leadership, and the Republican National Committee. The latter focused instead on Kwanzaa and promoting amnesty, which the Congressional Budget Office determined would lower the wages of working class Americans, many of whom make up the bulk of the Duck Dynasty audience.

A survivor of Nazi-occupied Austria who sees parallels between that dark period and the United States of today has a word of warning and advice to Americans: “Keep your guns and buy more guns.”

Katie Worthman spoke earlier this year of what she witnessed as a child in Austria during Adolph Hitler’s rise to power, which was followed by Soviet occupation of the country. She said the Nazi takeover happened gradually, as opposed to media accounts to the contrary, according to NRA News, which reported that Worthman said:

In 1938, the media reported that Hitler rode into Austria with tanks and guns and took us over. Not true at all. The Austrian people elected Hitler by 98 percent of the vote by means of the ballot box. Now you might ask how could a Christian nation… elect a monster like Hitler. The truth is at the beginning Hitler didn’t look like or talk like a monster at all. He talked like an American politician.

Worthman said gun control also began gradually, before the Nazis eventually confiscated every firearm.

We also had gun registration. All the Austrian people… had guns. But the government said, “the guns are very dangerous. Children are playing with guns. Hunting accidents happen and we really have to have total controlled safety. And we had criminals again. And the only way that we can trace the criminal was by the serial number of the gun.”

So we dutifully went to the police station and we registered our guns. Not long after they said, “No, it didn’t help. The only way that we won’t have accidents and crimes [is] you bring the guns to the police station and then we don’t have any crimes anymore and any accidents. And if you don’t do that: capital punishment.”

So that’s what we did. So dictatorship didn’t happen overnight. It took five years. Gradually, little by little to escalate up to a dictatorship.

Nobody is coming for your guns, they said. Nobody is taking away your rights, they said. This is all about public safety, they said.

Nearly a year ago, the New York legislature passed the toughest gun control law in the country known as the S.A.F.E. Act. It was rushed through in the middle of the night and as soon as it landed on Governor Cuomo's desk, he signed it without asking questions. Now, local and state government are taking the opportunity to crack down on regulations already on the books which means for many, turn in your guns or leave.

Look at their blind, passionate hatred for those on the other side — like George Bush. I mean you can go to this Web site zombietime which has the photos of effigies of George Bush being burned, being decapitated. They look at regular left-wing, anti-war, anti-Bush rallies: they sell hats, bags, backpacks that said “Kill Bush” on them. Can you imagine — I mean forget the reaction from the Left, can you imagine a conservative making up such a bag for Obama or Clinton? No — you oppose their policies; you don’t hate them with the hot hot hate of a thousand suns.

...this essay exists for one reason only: To prove beyond any doubt that explicit and implicit threats to Bush’s life were commonly displayed at public protests throughout his term as president. Below this introduction you will find dozens of examples of such threats — unaltered photographs from a wide variety of sources, along with links verifying their authenticity.

If you buy one of the less expensive insurance plans sold through the new health law’s marketplaces, you may be in for a surprise: Some plans won’t pay for doctor visits before you meet your annual deductible, which could be thousands of dollars.

“This could be the next shoe to drop, as people don’t realize that if they’re buying a bronze plan, they may have to pay $5,000 out of pocket before it contributes a penny,” said Carl McDonald, senior analyst with Citi Investment Research, speaking at a conference last month in Washington.

Comprehensive plans with deductibles usually cover wellness checks from the start (especially in group plans) — or at least they did until ObamaCare made the entire risk pool a lot more costly. In order to trim costs, especially with millions of new policyholders expected to flood the risk pools, insurers have shielded themselves against the larger risk. Unfortunately, that will have a dampening effect on what Democrats said would be the biggest benefit of ObamaCare — heightened access to routine care:

Experts are worrying that some new enrollees will be discouraged from seeing doctors if they have to pay the full charge, rather than simply a copayment. In Miami, for example, 40 percent of bronze plans require consumers to pay the full deductible before coverage kicks in, according to an analysis by online broker eHealthinsurance.com, a private online marketplace, for Kaiser Health News. The average deductible among the examined bronze plans in Miami is $5,735.

Put it this way: If the average deductible is $5,735 and a doctor visit is $85, it would take sixty-eight doctor visits before the insurance kicked in — more than one visit per week. And it would start all over again every year.

...(it) is the worst of both worlds. The law forces people to pay higher premiums for largely unnecessary comprehensive coverage — especially the middle class — and then forces them to pay for the routine care out of pocket anyway. Health-savings accounts that might have shielded consumers from the pain are now being discouraged, which means this comes out of their checking accounts, right along with the higher premiums.

The result? People will pay more for less coverage, and then spend thousands of dollars before seeing the first dollar in benefits, except for certain preventive tests that HHS deemed mandatory. This will discourage people from getting normal wellness care and quick intervention on illnesses, forcing them to wait until they’re very sick to see a doctor. And even that might be not so bad, considering how often people fill waiting rooms for cold and flu symptoms that could easily be handled with over-the-counter treatment, but it’s not what the Obama administration and Democrats promised. And it’s certainly not “affordable care.”

After recalls suddenly grabbed hold of the nation's attention in 2012, anyone could have been excused for thinking they might have gone back to being little used, frequently ignored weapons this year. But 2013 proved such expectations wrong. Despite a sharp drop in their total number, recall elections once again managed to place themselves on centerstage in American politics.

Unlike in Wisconsin in 2012, the most prominent recalls of 2013 did not appear to be stark Democrat versus Republican fights. Instead, it was a hot button political issue — the fight over gun control — that allowed recalls to push their way into the spotlight.

Colorado, for instance, saw some of its most expensive state legislative elections in history: Two Democratic state senators — including the State Senate president — were kicked out and a third resigned, over the state's new gun control laws....

Already, there are at least 25 recalls scheduled for next year, starting on January 2.

Beginning January 1, 2014, the federal government will ban the use of 60-watt and 40-watt incandescent light bulbs. The light bulb has become a symbol in the fight for consumer freedom and against unnecessary governmental interference into the lives of the American people....

Proponents of government-imposed efficiency standards and regulations will say, “So what? There are still plenty of lighting options on the shelves at Home Depot; we’re saving families money; and we’re reducing harmful climate change emissions.”

The “so what” is that the federal government is taking decisions out of the hands of families and businesses, destroying jobs, and restricting consumer choice in the market. We all have a wide variety of preferences regarding light bulbs. It is not the role of the federal government to override those preferences with what it believes is in our best interest.

The CNN/ORC International survey shows Republicans holding a 49 percent to 44 percent lead over Democrats, a swift reversal from just two months ago, when the Democratic Party stood steady with an 8-point lead over the GOP, 50 percent to 42 percent.

“My mom once wrote a romance memoir about men she had dated–and I use that term loosely–and she described one guy she was currently dating––my mom was 85 at the time––as the Nijinsky of cunnilingus. And she made me proofread the book.”

Indeed, if there’s any larger message to her routine, it is simply to announce that the exception has now become the rule: vulgarity is expected, decency a surprise....

Defenders of vulgarity, and there are many, also say that parents just need to do a better job of monitoring their kids, as if the absence of kids is, by itself, a license for gratuitous obscenity.

I don’t think the vulgarians realize how hard that is when producers and executives refuse to stay in their lanes. Even family-oriented TV shows are punctuated with commercials not just for erectile dysfunction pills and utterly unromantic romantic aids but also inappropriate ads for incredibly inappropriate movies and TV shows. And sometimes family-friendly networks are family-friendly in name only (I’m looking at you, ABC Family Channel). And don’t get me started about the Internet.

The President, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid (with no small help from Justice John Roberts) take away our health care, and we allow it. They take away our insurance, and we allow it. They take away our doctors, and we allow it. They charge us thousands of dollars more a year, and we allow it. They make legal products illegal, and we allow it. They cripple our businesses, and we allow it. They announce by fiat that we must ignore our most deeply held beliefs – and we allow it.

Where is your spine, America?

...I will say it again: WE ARE NOT SUBJECTS. Not only is the Tea Party right on the fiscal issues, but it appears that they are more relevant than ever. We fought a war once to prove we did not want to be the subjects of a king, and the Boston Tea Party was just a taste of the larger conflict to come. If some people missed that lesson in history class, we can give them a refresher..

HB 707 declares, “The assumption of power that the federal government has made by enacting the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 interferes with the right of the people of the State of Georgia to regulate health care as they see fit and makes a mockery of James Madison’s assurance in Federalist No. 45 that the ‘powers delegated’ to the federal government are ‘few and defined,’ while those of the states are ‘numerous and indefinite.’”

Next month, the Missouri Senate will consider a bill which would effectively cripple the implementation of the Affordable Care Act within the state.

Following the lead of South Carolina, where lawmakers are fast-tracking House Bill 3101 in 2014, and Georgia, where HB707 was recently introduced by Rep. Jason Spencer, Missouri State Senator John T. Lamping (R-24) pre-filed Senate Bill 546 (SB546) to update the Health Care Freedom Act passed by Missouri voters in 2010. It passed that year with more than 70% support.

SB546 would ban Missouri from taking any action that would “compel, directly or indirectly, any person, employer, or health care provider to participate in any health care system.” That means the state would be banned by law from operating a health care exchange for the federal government.

The bill also proposes suspending the licenses of insurers who accept federal subsidies which result in the “imposition of penalties contrary to the public policy” set forth in the legislation. Since it is unlikely that any insurer would then accept a subsidy, not a single employer in the state could be hit with the employer-mandate penalties those subsidies trigger.

“...Duck Dynasty is not a show about one man's views,” the statement continued. “It resonates with a large audience because it is a show about family… a family that America has come to love. As you might have seen in many episodes, they come together to reflect and pray for unity, tolerance and forgiveness. These are three values that we at A+E Networks also feel strongly about.”

“Duck Dynasty’s” Phil Robertson is not alone. He’s the latest in a long, long lineup of politically incorrect targets of the left’s sensitivity mob. Founded in 1985, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) gangstas won’t stop until both the cultural and legal enforcement of their agenda are the norm.

GLAAD is hoping that the current surge of anger over Phil Robertson will begin and end with Duck Dynasty, and then the rest of us who have been erased and whose lives have been destroyed by this totalitarian organization can be out of the way again. Broom, meet rug -- sweep the human waste underneath, march on to the next court case, and proclaim victory.

There's only one way that GLAAD will come out of this kerfuffle unscathed -- if you, the conservatives of America, let them. Please don't. This is much bigger than one reality show.

Unable to ignore millions of cancellation letters and a rare presidential apology, fact-checkers at PolitiFact and the Washington Post designated “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” as 2013's “Lie of the Year.”

Repelled by Obamacare's deceptive sales tactics, Americans dread its fallout, but know our system allows us to think again. We can repeal and replace bad laws.

But we can't reverse the fallout from Iranian nukes, which explains President Kennedy's warning that while “domestic policy can defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.”

It also explains the backlash from allies and Congress to the recently signed interim agreement with Iran, the world's most dangerous regime and self-described deceiver. As Alan Dershowitz suggested, it “could be a cataclysmic error of gigantic proportions.”...

After nearly four years of defending the Affordable Care Act as the “law of the land,” the White House has spent the past three months revising and rewriting the federal government’s forced overhaul of American health insurance. And the closer the calendar gets to Obamacare’s full implementation on Jan. 1, the faster the administration scrambles to fix its most urgent flaws. The more it changes, the more it fails, the more it changes....This law is so bad, the only certainties are more chaos and more public unhappiness.

...the president shut down the government this fall because he refused to meet a Republican demand that Obamacare’s individual mandate be delayed. Now the president himself has done what Republicans — labeled as extortionists and terrorists at the time — asked him to do, though he did so without the consent of Congress, as usual.

As the White House comes to terms with the fact that there will be even more uninsured Americans in 2014 as a direct result of its “signature achievement,” it now must reconcile a new problem created by its revisions: If Obamacare-compliant insurance policies are creating so much hardship, why isn’t everyone exempt from the individual mandate?

Studio executives who have spent the past few years releasing superhero and zombie films have, it seems, had an epiphany....

“For years Hollywood bent over backwards to reach special interest groups, be it feminists or environmentalists. It has finally realised that there are 91 million evangelical Christians in America.”

For their part, studio executives have taken something of a leap of faith that films in which religious figures save the world will bring big box office receipts.

That faith is based in no small part on the success of The Bible, a television mini-series shown on the History channel earlier this year, which averaged 11.4 million viewers and became America’s most watched cable show of 2013.

“It made the Bible cool to talk about again,” said Mr Cooke. “The separation of church and state in America is so strong that people had become afraid to talk about God, at work or at school. Suddenly, these Bible stories were water cooler conversation again.”

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted announced Wednesday that his office found 17 non-citizens illegally cast ballots in the 2012 presidential election — and has referred the case for possible prosecution.

The alleged crime would be a notable case of voter fraud in a key swing state. By law, only American citizens are allowed the privilege of casting ballots for the nation’s leaders.

To be clear, this would not have swung the election, but this is plain and clear evidence that shows beyond a reasonable doubt that the system is broken on some level. If something is broken, why don’t we try to fix it or at least improve it?

It doesn’t stop there:

As part of Ohio’s efforts to clean up the voting rolls, election officials discovered that more than 257,000 dead people were still listed as active voters.

And so, as we reach the end of another year of political strife that’s fundamentally based on clashing views on the role of government in society, I thought I’d update a list I made two years ago and hereby present President Obama’s top 10 constitutional violations of 2013.

The icebreakers Xue Long and Aurora Australis, and a French research vessel Astrolabe are cruising towards the Akademik Shokalskiy at full throttle for rescue.... The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) is coordinating a search and rescue for a Russian passenger ship beset by ice approximately 1500 nautical miles south of Hobart.

Three ships with icebreaking capability have responded, including the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) vessel Aurora Australis, and are now en route to the area.

The New York Times called the announcement "vague" and noted that "it was not clear on Tuesday how many people would be affected, or how consumers would prove that website errors had prevented them from signing up by the deadline on Tuesday night."

The Obama administration announcement also failed to note when the "special enrollment period" would cease; however, White House spokesperson Tara McGuinness assured Americans it is not offering a "blanket extension" but will consider "assistance to individuals on a case-by-case basis."

On the very last day to sign up for ObamaCare before the end of the year, President Obama and his signature piece of legislation received more bad news via a sympathetic media outlet. A new CNN poll shows that support for ObamaCare has collapsed to just 35%, a new record low for this poll and a five-point drop in just 30 days. Opposition sits at a whopping 62%.

Remember: In 2008, when Obama was elected, 52 percent was considered a 'blowout' 'decisive' victory

In an interview published Tuesday in the Washington Post, Snowden said that his disclosures about the extent of NSA surveillance on phone and internet traffic had achieved his goal of sparking a debate over the nation's intelligence operations.

“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” said Snowden. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated."

"I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself,” Snowden said about his leaks....

“All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed,” Snowden told the Washington Post. “That is a milestone we left a long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch goals.”

Snowden offered vignettes from his intelligence career and from his recent life as “an indoor cat” in Russia. But he consistently steered the conversation back to surveillance, democracy and the meaning of the documents he exposed....

The NSA’s business is “information dominance,” the use of other people’s secrets to shape events. At 29, Snowden upended the agency on its own turf....

By his own terms, Snowden succeeded beyond plausible ambition. The NSA, accustomed to watching without being watched, faces scrutiny it has not endured since the 1970s, or perhaps ever....

People who accuse him of disloyalty, he said, mistake his purpose.

“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”

What entitled Snowden, now 30, to take on that responsibility?

“That whole question — who elected you? — inverts the model,” he said. “They elected me. The overseers.”

He named the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees.

“Dianne Feinstein elected me when she asked softball questions” in committee hearings, he said. “Mike Rogers elected me when he kept these programs hidden. . . . The FISA court elected me when they decided to legislate from the bench on things that were far beyond the mandate of what that court was ever intended to do. The system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.”

...They themselves will refuse to show the tolerance that they demand of others. This is because they define the views they disagree with as “intolerance,” “H8,” et al. and the opposition to those views as necessarily being for “tolerance” and against “H8″ regardless of the actual lack of tolerance or hatred that they show. ◼ In other words:

The cost of President Obama’s massive health-care law will hit Americans in 2014 as new taxes pile up on their insurance premiums and on their income-tax bills.

Most insurers aren’t advertising the ObamaCare taxes that are added on to premiums, opting instead to discretely pass them on to customers while quietly lobbying lawmakers for a break.

But one insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama, laid bare the taxes on its bills with a separate line item for “Affordable Care Act Fees and Taxes.”

...But ObamaCare taxes don’t stop with health-plan premiums.

Americans also will pay hidden taxes, such as the 2.3 percent medical-device tax that will inflate the cost of items such as pacemakers, stents and prosthetic limbs.

Those with high out-of-pocket medical expenses also will get smaller income-tax deductions.
Americans are currently allowed to deduct expenses that exceed 7.5 percent of their annual income. The threshold jumps to 10 percent under ObamaCare, costing taxpayers about $15 billion over 10 years.

CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's military-backed interim government declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization Wednesday, intensifying its campaign of arrests and prosecutions targeting its members and tightening the noose on the group's network of charities and businesses.

The unprecedented executive decision likely ends any chance of reconciliation between the government and the 85-year-old Brotherhood, still Egypt's most organized political group. It marks a stunning reversal of fortunes for the long-outlawed organization that saw member Mohammed Morsi reach Egypt's highest office in the country's first democratic election, only to be ousted in a popularly backed military coup in July....

The declaration comes after another sweeping decision Tuesday aimed at draining the Brotherhood's finances by freezing the funds of more than 1,000 non-government organizations with links to the group and putting more than 100 schools run by the group under government supervision. That directly attacks the grassroots strength of the Brotherhood, where it has much of its power in Egyptian life.

Eissa said Wednesday's decision means that those who "participate in the group's activities, in the organization or promotion verbally or by writing or by any other means or financing its activities" will be facing punishment according to the law.

"It's not possible for Egypt the state nor Egypt the people to submit to the Muslim Brotherhood terrorism," Eissa said.

“Duck Dynasty’s” Phil Robertson is not alone. He’s the latest in a long, long lineup of politically incorrect targets of the left’s sensitivity mob. Founded in 1985, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) gangstas won’t stop until both the cultural and legal enforcement of their agenda are the norm.

One truly has to wonder how the vaunted White House staff of advisers and sycophants came up with the battle plan for Friday’s presser, the last of a terrible year: “Hey, what if he goes out, lists all the things he did wrong, apologizes repeatedly, then promises to do better next year? Anyone? OK, how about he goes out and makes a few balloon animals. C’mon, gimme’ some help, people!”

Sure, he had a compliant press filling the White House briefing room, ready to lob softballs, but still, he’d have to explain a lot: The Obamacare mess, the NSA spying debacle, America’s appeasement of Iran, the gridlock on Capitol Hill that he engendered — the list goes on and on. Perhaps that explains why he was nearly 20 minutes late to his own press conference.

Monday, December 23, 2013

Last July, after President Obama unilaterally delayed the Obamacare employer mandate for a year, House Republicans asked why the break should apply only to businesses. Why shouldn't individuals be relieved of the burden, too?

So the House voted, 251 to 174, to delay the individual mandate. Twenty-two Democrats joined Republicans in voting for delay. A total of 174 Democrats voted to keep the mandate as is.

Of course the move went nowhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate. But that was before Obamacare implementation began Oct. 1. It was before the canceled policies, the higher premiums, the higher deductibles, and narrower doctor networks that have come to define Obamacare for millions of Americans....

A clean vote on the individual mandate would be infinitely more effective for Republicans. That's not to say it would succeed. Of course, many House Democrats will still vote against delay, and Senate Democrats will kill it.

But Republicans held dozens and dozens of votes on Obamacare in years past when the public had little idea what was at stake. Republicans warned that Obamacare would be a disaster, but voters didn't know what was coming. Now, they do. Maybe it's time for the House to start voting again.

Welcome

I would like to introduce myself. I am John Schutt the new chairman of the Humboldt County Republican Central Committee. I'd like to ask each one of you to send me your thoughts and ideas on making Humboldt great again. I also am asking for your help, need republicans for open spots on the central committee, committee seats, letters to the editor writers, and many other opportunities. The 2018 election for governor and other seats is just around the corner and we will need all your help. Please feel free to call the office (442-2259) or leave a message here (or on Facebook) and I will get back to you as soon as possible.